Tape, disk and cloud data archiver Spectra has extended its StorCycle data lifecycle management software with more detailed job controls, encryption, a new fast-access storage tier and automatic restarts for failed StorCycle virtual machines.
StorCycle is file/object lifecycle management software that scans primary on-premises or public cloud storage and moves older, less-accessed data to less expensive storage such as nearline disk (NAS or object), tape, or archive storage tiers in the public cloud — both AWS and Azure. All these are classed as ‘perpetual storage tiers’ and migrated data can be used for data protection, archiving and disaster recovery. Once moved, data can still be accessed and searched.
Mat Brown, President at Spectra partner One Technology, said “Our customers like StorCycle because it is easy to deploy, streamlines their workflows and automates the management of their data. The byproduct ends up being improved infrastructure performance and lower costs.”
Feature list
V3.5 StorCycle software adds these features:
- Migrate or copy S3 cloud data to a BlackPearl object storage device (disk or tape). BlackPearl is a hybrid flash/disk, front-end cache that stores files as objects on disk and back-end tape devices.
- Encryption of data migrated by StorCycle instead of, as before, via the encryption capabilities of the storage targets themselves.
- Single HTML links for jobs instead of for each migrated file, making it easier to access and restore data.
- Job Queue Priority Control — allows users to prioritise jobs in the queue, giving them greater control over job execution order.
- Multiple linked StorCycle installations on the same network provide a single search window for migration and storage projects.
- Administrators can set daily restore limits for users to regulate the amount of data returned to primary storage so as to maintain system performance levels.
- Settable data age policies so a user could set a policy to migrate all data that is, for example, 97 days old and older.
- High Availability on VMs — leverages the failover capabilities of hyperconverged Virtual Machine (VM) systems so that, if a VM instance of StorCycle fails, a fresh one will be auto-restarted on a new node.
Comment
Spectra says this is a two-tier storage scheme, with primary and perpetual storage tiers. But the perpetual tier is actually multiple alternative tiers, such as nearline disk (NAS), object storage, object on tape, tape, AWS S3 standard, Glacier and Deep Archive, and Azure hot, cool and archive tiers. Data can be put on different tiers for faster (NAS) or slower(Deep Archive) access reasons
Data can be automatically moved from primary storage, leaving links behind, to any one of these so-called perpetual tiers at a file level using auto-migrate policies, or via Project Archive to store whole projects. A scheduled delete function can delete files/objects after preset retention periods.
StorCycle has RESTful API access and has links to other application software which can use it, such as Veeam and OpenDrives. We would expect Spectra to add links and partnership arrangements to data analysis companies who could use StorCycle as a data storage resource.
